Vendors Focus on Analytic Solutions

Oracle Corp. released Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP, while Apache Software Foundation announced that the latest version of Cassandra can hold up to two billion columns per row. Additionally, IBM Corp. continues to build out its offerings for data analytics, and projects $16 billion in business analytics and optimization revenue by 2015.

Focal Points:

• Oracle announced a business intelligence (BI) application targeted at SAP AG customers. The new product, Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP, features an adapter that is compliant with SAP's ABAP code, and is certified with Oracle's Data Integrator tool for pulling in SAP financial data. Additionally, it delivers role-based information to various types of managers and more than 200 reports, said Oracle. Data Integrator tool and Oracle BI Foundation Suite are prerequisites for Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP. The application is immediately available for only Oracle database customers at $5,800 per user plus annual maintenance, said Oracle. The Data Integrator Enterprise Edition costs an additional $23,000 per processor license, and Foundation Suite includes five components, Oracle added.
• Over the past five years, IBM has spent more than $14 billion to acquire 24 analytics companies. One of the largest acquisitions was Cognos, for which IBM paid $5 billion in late 2007. In 2009, the vendor purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion, and last fall, it spent $1.7 billion to buy Netezza. In 2010, IBM went on a shopping spree, acquiring Coremetrics, Clarity Systems, e-discovery vendor PSS Systems, governance, risk, and compliance software vendor OpenPages, and marketing automation player Unica. According to IBM, it will continue to invest in the analytics space, and does not expect acquisitions to slow down anytime soon. IBM has 8,000 analytics and optimization business consultants, as well as 200 mathematicians who have secured nearly 500 analytics patents for IBM. The vendor's business analytics revenue grew 14 percent year-over-year in the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2010. This is compared to 3-percent companywide revenue growth. Looking ahead, IBM expects $16 billion in business analytics and optimization revenue by 2015.
• Apache announced the latest version of its open source distributed database, Cassandra version 0.7.  With a newly installed Large Row Support feature, 0.7 can pack two billion columns into a row, which could be useful to "big data" cloud computing projects, Apache said. Previous versions had no set upper limit, although the maximum amount of data that could be held in a single row was approximately 2GB, according to Apache. This upper limit has been eliminated. Additional new features include secondary indexes for providing an easy way to query data on local machines, and the ability to make changes to the schema without restarting the entire cluster, Apache added.

Experton Group believes analytics will be one of the hottest software sectors over the next few years, as business executives recognize its use is the most economical way to drive revenues, increase loyalty, improve corporate image, and reduce risks. IBM's actions and results show the expected value the market will have for companies targeting the space. This market is one of its four core growth segments the company is pursuing as part of its new five-year strategy. Oracle is targeting the SAP financial application space, as SAP has a much larger share of the core market and it maps into its overall plan of winning market share. Similarly, an up-and-coming sector of the analytics space is big data and Apache expects to play there as well, especially since it has a large share of the Web server market. IT executives should ensure they are working with their business peers to meet the business requirements and strategies for analytics.